This invention relates to improved manufacture of fragmenting warheads for land mines and for warheads of other fragmenting type munitions (FCAP). It deals particularly with methods of positioning and permanently affixing required multiple fragments in place into a warhead, which steps are integral to manufacture of such warheads.
The M18A1 Tactical Claymore mine in use is a directional anti-personnel mine and area denial system. It is used to prevent enemies from entering a critical location and to control various zones through launching multiple lethal fragment projectiles thereat. An M18A1 consists of a plastic case housing with a curved layer of fragments during storage, leading up to usage in theater by propelling such fragments at a target. This mold and two (2) part epoxy potting process may be thought of as the traditional method of manufacturing the embedded fragments of an M18A1 claymore mine.
A new curve design to optimize the lethality of the claymore while reducing the physical size of the M18A1 was desired, but this effort would require repetitive multiple iterations of prototypes after each live fire testing. Prototypes of different curve design iterations would therefore have required many tooling molds to be fabricated, at the very least. The cost and scheduling to produce such multiple molds are a great hurdle. Since the conventional methods of binding the patterned fragments onto prototype claymores are not practical for such repetitive testing, if not even generally for standard serialized manufacturing of landmines, new solutions had to be explored.
The conventional binding method is unnecessarily heavy because of excess epoxy. It may be also coincidentally be less efficient in lethality because of unnecessary energy loss in breaking up the excessive epoxy binder between the fragments. The conventional methods of manufacturing would be to first arrange and encase steel balls into a mold, and then to pour a two part liquid epoxy as the binder. Since the steel balls have to be positioned in a specific pattern, the adhesive/binder cannot be applied before the arrangement of the steel balls; adhesive would necessarily have to be applied after the pattern is formed. Further, the conventional methods add unnecessary weight to the user and require more energy to break up the excessive epoxy binder. As mentioned, it also is too costly to develop multiple case iteration design for live firing because a new mold fabrication would be required for each iteration/concept.
The invention describes a method of binding the tungsten fragment cubes in a specific pattern onto the plastic case without costly mold fabrication. The binding process needs to be easily processed and conforms to all new case iteration concepts. The shear strength of the binder must be durable, but still low enough strength to where it does not impede launching of the projectiles.